Victoria’s Scottish Lion

by Greenwood, Adrian; Haythornthwaite, Philip;

  Though the Great Redan stood unconquered, one more heave might carry the town. Windham pleaded with Codrington to throw the Highlanders forward,* but Codrington refused, so Windham set out for headquarters to persuade Simpson and Airey. Blaming the defeat on a ‘want of pluck and method’, Windham then asked Airey, within earshot of Simpson, to ‘Tell the General he ought to attack again at once with the Highland Division’. ‘Well, maybe you’re right,’ said Simpson, ‘but I must see Pelissier about it in the morning, first.’163

  The assault had resulted in 7,551 French casualties (including 409 officers), 2,000 men and 154 officers killed or wounded among the British, and for the Russians, losses of around 13,000. So far kept in reserve, Campbell’s Highlanders had suffered sixty-three casualties, including Brigadier-General Cameron, who was mildly injured. ‘Had Sir Colin Campbell been given command of the whole business’, argued Wolseley, ‘and allowed to make his own arrangements and plans, and to employ the Highland Brigade, who had practically suffered no loss during the war, we should never have been beaten out of the Redan’.164

  By 4 p.m. the forward trenches were filled with Highlanders, watching as an unceasing procession of dead and wounded was carried to the rear. It was too late in the day to think about another assault. ‘We made coffee for ourselves in our mess tins and then we laid down to rest, everything being quiet’, recalled Colour-Sergeant Cameron. A while later he overheard Campbell speaking to Colonel Douglas of the 79th. ‘Don’t let them be disturbed. They will require all the rest they can get, for by tomorrow at daybreak I must be in there’, said Campbell, pointing towards the Redan. Unfortunately for the men, the Russian sappers made sleep all but impossible. ‘Several explosions of gigantic character were made at short intervals, evidently the magazines of different batteries along the line of their defences’, explained Campbell:

  At one moment an explosion of a formidable description would be made on the left – shortly after, one or two at different other places, and this was continued along the exterior line of their defences throughout the night at short intervals in different places, with an occasional explosion in the Town.

  A little after midnight Campbell ordered the 42nd forward with 100 gabions to form a lodgement in front of the Redan, ready for another offensive. Meanwhile, Lieutenant McBean of the 93rd crept out to retrieve the wounded, but as he approached the Redan, he found it oddly silent,** apparently abandoned. He reported back immediately. Thinking it might be a trick to lure his Highlanders inside and then blow them sky high, Campbell ordered McBean to find twenty volunteers to investigate further. When Major Ewart announced to the 93rd’s light company that he wanted them to provide half this detachment, the men were open-mouthed. They were under the impression the Redan was still guarded by several thousand Russians.

  McBean’s party confirmed the Redan was virtually empty, but Campbell was still suspicious:

  I dared not occupy it, from the number of explosions taking place all round, before daylight, but while the enemy fired every Magazine along the line of their defences, they did not touch their Magazines in the Great Redan, an act of great humanity – for the whole of our wounded who remained in the ditch and face of the Work, and between the ditch and our trenches, would have been destroyed.

  While Campbell hesitated, the Russians left Sebastopol to its fate, methodically evacuating their troops via a bridge of rafts across the harbour. In just a few hours 30,000–40,000 Russians escaped, leaving behind only 500 wounded men and a doctor. Gorchakoff ordered his troops to burn every building as they retired, ‘thus offering a barrier of fire to the advance of either French or English’, as Campbell put it. As he told Seward:

  When the whole of the houses in Sebastopol were in full blaze, so strong as to be impossible to arrest the flames, they began to remove their bridge, evidently for fear of being prevented by artillery from taking it away, leaving their Steamers to take off the troops which had been left in town to effect its destruction by fire.

  ‘I cannot conceive anything more complete or more perfect in every detail than the mode and manner in which they accomplished their retreat and withdrawal from Sebastopol, and transport of their troops across the harbour’, wrote Campbell, little knowing that two years later he would be mounting a dangerous night-time evacuation of his own (see Plate 21). No further offensive was needed from the allies. ‘I for one was very thankful at the turn things had taken’, admitted Sergeant Cameron. ‘I don’t know what the old veteran thought about it, but I was glad he was disappointed in not being able to keep his appointment at daybreak.’165

  For troops who had witnessed a year-long siege, the hush which now descended on Sebastopol was curiously alien. ‘The cessation of fire seems so odd to us’, wrote Paget. ‘It is like an old clock ceasing to tick.’166 After sunrise, Campbell ventured into the deserted Redan with his old Opium War colleague, Captain Keppel.*** They found the ground in front of the Malakoff so strewn with shell splinters it was ‘literally paved with iron’.167 ‘Horrors met us at every step’, recalled Keppel. ‘In a small hut, at a table, was a Russian officer, smart in his uniform but on speaking to him, I found he was dead. Faithful, half-starved dogs guarded bodies, from which no coaxing would draw them.’168 The French, as usual, were first in to loot,* swiftly followed by the Highlanders. ‘The 93rd behaved infamously’, complained one lieutenant. ‘I saw the men rifling the pockets of our dead Officers and didn’t I pitch into them? The brutes would not lend a hand in carrying the stretchers, so intent were they on plunder.’169 At 9 a.m. Campbell’s division tramped back to Kamara, out of harm’s way.

  The Russians’ retreat from Sebastopol, from W.F. Williams’s England’s Battles by Sea and Land.

  At last, Sebastopol had fallen, but the elation which greeted the news of victory soon faded when the public realised it meant neither an end to the war, nor the start of a new offensive to occupy the rest of the Crimea. ‘The nation should awake from the flattering dream that it is treading the path of victory,’ declared the United Service Magazine, ‘when in reality, it is, like Bunyan’s pilgrim, wandering in the valley of humiliation.’170 ‘The calamity was deeper, darker, more humiliating than the most despondent had feared’. lamented The Times, before going on to demand Simpson’s recall.171 The ‘feeble attack of the English on the Redan stamps their Crimean generals with the indelible mark of incapacity’, pronounced Karl Marx.172

  Once again, it seemed there might be a chance for Campbell to take over, despite the government’s best efforts. The day before the assault on the Redan, Simpson, acting on Panmure’s instructions, had offered Campbell the post of commandant of Malta, the job Palmerston had tried to foist on Sir Richard England to get him out of the way. Sterling condemned it as ‘an insult at this moment to a man of his antecedents’.173 Panmure knew it was a slap in the face, but then if Campbell resigned in a huff, it would serve his purpose just as well. Campbell told Simpson ‘to thank his lordship for the offer, but that as long as we remained in the presence of the enemy, I would prefer to remain where I was – unless it was desired that I should leave this army’.174

  The queen’s account of Campbell’s reaction was somewhat more dramatic. According to Her Majesty, Campbell had remarked to Bentinck:

  They have offered me Malta. Have they offered it you?’ Sir H. B. answered no, & begged he would not put himself in a passion about it. He ground his teeth, clenched his fists & exclaimed ‘That d— Panmure has offered me Malta in the face of the enemy. I tell you what, Bentinck, if there was a King on the Throne, I would not remain here an hour longer, but for that dear queen, I’ll remain here to the last.175

  It brought the prospect of retirement to the forefront of his mind once more. ‘My affairs in latter years have been so prosperous that I hope to be able to have a little home of my own in some pleasant and convenient quarter of London,’ he told Seward on 10 September, ‘where you will sometimes come and stay with me and my old sister, who will be my housekeeper and will help me to
take care of you and make you comfortable.’ ‘If I outlive this Campaign or the service upon which we are at present employed, I shall bid adieu to soldiering and give place to younger men. I completed last month my 47th year of service, sufficiently long to justify my seeking for retirement.’176

  Rumours now began to circulate of Simpson’s imminent resignation. Conscious of his ‘want of health and strength of mind for the labour and responsibility of his command’,177 the commander-in-chief had secretly informed the prime minister of his wish to return home. ‘Should his successor be Colin Campbell or Codrington. This we must consider’, mused Palmerston on 30 September. While back in July, Panmure, Palmerston and the queen had all been eager for Codrington to be Simpson’s heir, now they were having second thoughts. The Redan had destroyed his credibility. One surgeon likened Codrington’s conduct to ‘a fireman attempting to extinguish a fierce and wide-spreading conflagration with a garden syringe’. Windham had written a memo analysing the assault, which Simpson had forwarded to Panmure. Although Codrington was only mentioned once, his culpability was clearly implied. In Russell’s words, the Redan had ‘dammed the current which had set in so long and so quietly in his favour’.178

  Not with the prime minister, it seemed. ‘We do not, on the whole think that any real blame attached to him for the failure on that day’, insisted Palmerston. ‘The thing attempted was scarcely possible.’179 ‘Sir C. Campbell will have his supporters, and Sir W. Codrington’s unsuccessful attempt on the 8th will somewhat strengthen their case’, Panmure informed the queen. Nevertheless, he was ‘still disposed that Your Majesty’s troops will be safer in Sir W. Codrington’s hands than those of any other officer’.180 The rest of the government was not so sure. ‘The Cabinet had a leaning towards Sir Wm. Codrington, on account of the unpractability [sic] of Sir C. Campbell’s temper, etc.,’ explained the queen, ‘but felt that, if there was a strong feeling in the Army as to the failure at the Redan being due to Sir Wm. Codrington’s bad management, & that Sir C. Campbell, it was believed, would have succeeded had he undertaken it, then it would not do to appoint Codrington.’181 Her Majesty agreed. ‘The Queen does not think that it will do to place Sir William Codrington over the heads of all his seniors upon a patent failure,’ she told her government:

  Public opinion at home and in the Army would never support this, as, in fact, it would not be just. Under all the circumstances the Queen thinks Sir Colin Campbell (with his known good qualities and defects) the senior General after Sir H. Bentinck’s return, also the fittest to take the command and to inspire our army and our Allies with confidence.182

  Unfortunately, the mood at Horse Guards was against him. ‘There was some desperate jealousy of Sir Colin among the military staff’, wrote the Duke of Argyll.183 Hardinge considered he had risen as far as his talents allowed. Months ago, Raglan had advised the Duke of Newcastle that Campbell was unfit for isolated command. He was also wrongly reported to be a poor linguist.* Admiral Lyons told the diarist Charles Greville that ‘he never had well understood why it was that Colin Campbell was always considered out of the question, and his own opinion seemed to be that he was the fittest man. The French thought so, and one of the alleged reasons against him, viz. that he could not speak French, was certainly not true.’184

  The government wanted a conciliator. Raglan’s great strength had been his emollience, sometimes to a fault. The impression in Whitehall was that Campbell would infuriate Britain’s allies. ‘I have an idea that Sir C. is a fiery-tempered fellow’, declared Panmure,185 but as one officer pointed out:

  So far from being likely to quarrel with the French, there is no officer here possessed with so high an opinion of their character … It is charming to see the way in which Sir Colin is greeted by all the officers of that French Division [Vinoy’s] when he goes down to visit them in the trenches.186

  An aide of Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, ambassador to the Ottoman Porte, said that there was no better instance of cordial Anglo-French relations than between Campbell and Vinoy.187 But in saving his diplomacy for foreign allies, Campbell had developed a reputation as a curmudgeon among his own. ‘His energy – a disturbing, and not always popular quality – together with the singular enmity he used to bear towards the Guards, was enough to prevent him from being liked in proportion to the trust he inspired’, observed Kinglake.188 Annoying the Guards was tactically disastrous. Campbell was becoming a traitor to his adopted class, a grizzled enfant terrible, a most unsafe pair of hands. Simpson thought him ‘peppery’ and Campbell had already fallen out with the new chief of staff.189 ‘Sir Colin would never have got on as Commander-in-Chief’, wrote one officer. ‘His temper was very violent, he has no manners and would inevitably have been in hot water with all his superior officers in no time.’190 ‘Sir Colin Campbell, with all his great merits as an Officer, is the incarnation of what is called a “troublesome customer”’, maintained Colonel Pakenham.

  After appointing Bernard Montgomery as General Auchinleck’s replacement in North Africa, Winston Churchill told his wife ‘If he is disagreeable to those around him, he is disagreeable to the enemy.’ Palmerston’s government was far less indulgent. ‘The official people are evidently afraid of giving the command to Sir Colin Campbell for fear of his temper’, wrote one officer. ‘He has too much of Sir C. Napier in him.’191 ‘He is also the man to make Lord Panmure afraid’, claimed Sterling. ‘If he were Commander-in-Chief, I am convinced he would not submit to manage his army under the dictation of the electric wires from the War Office.’192 Panmure was in complete agreement with that assessment: Campbell ‘had not shown that acquiescence in superior authority which he ought to have done’. In contrast, Codrington, as Panmure told the queen, was ‘a steady, good officer, attentive to his men, vigilant in position, calm in action, discreet in council’, a man whose ‘manner will secure courtesy’. In other words, a younger version of Raglan.

  Revenge also played its part. Since May 1855, Panmure had borne a grudge against Campbell for supplying Ellenborough (a powerful critic of Palmerston’s government) with letters asserting that the Russian defences at MacKenzie’s Farm, east of Sebastopol, were ‘impregnable’. It had been monstrously hypocritical of Campbell, given his disapproval of officers’ contributions to the newspapers. ‘These letters do the army infinitely more harm than I can tell and it is provoking to hear them read’,193 Panmure had told Raglan. For Ellenborough though, Campbell still remained ‘one of the very first officers we have, an officer who had the entire confidence of the late Sir Charles Napier for more than ten years, who I believe had designated him on his deathbed for that command in the army which I trust he will hold’.194 In April 1855 his lordship had tabled a resolution condemning the government’s failure to remove useless Crimean commanders, while at the same time holding Campbell up as a model general. None of this had raised Campbell’s stock with Panmure or Palmerston.

  Unvoiced was the suspicion that Campbell was something of a Scots Presbyterian counter-jumper, an idea given credence by his adoption of the Highland bonnet, the headgear of the rank and file, after the Battle of the Alma. It looked like an attempt to curry favour with the men, a dangerous stunt given the frenzied atmosphere of the times. Social unrest is doubly worrying for wartime governments, and by the autumn of 1855 they had suffered over a year’s critique of aristocratic rule by radicals who used Campbell as a poster boy, in particular from Henry Layard and his Administrative Reform Association. Practical, self-reliant and superficially self-made, Campbell was the darling of the aspirant middle class, but supporters such as Layard had an agenda stretching well beyond the army and encompassing the complete reform of the British elite, an agenda which they had been promoting to the masses. ‘[The people] are told that it is not this or that minister who can restore our affairs,’ Greville had written in November 1854, ‘but a change in the whole system of government, and the substitution of plebeians and new men for the leaders of parties and members of aristocratic families.’195 In s
uch an atmosphere, those in government, either consciously or unconsciously, were fearful of opening the door to Campbell’s sort. If today they let a cabinetmaker’s son lead the army in the Crimea, tomorrow it could be barricades in Whitehall, and the day after, sans-culottes lounging on the Woolsack. After all, at base, the ancient justification for an aristocracy was that it provided military commanders. Once Glaswegians showed they could do the job just as well, people might start asking what exactly all those bluebloods were really for.

  Then there was Campbell’s Highland aura. It might be popular with the mob, but to others it looked distinctly proletarian. Victoria and Albert, having taken over the lease on Balmoral in 1848 after the previous occupant choked on a fishbone, had repopularised Scottish style, but for aristocrats and intellectuals their obsession was a rather non-U foible. However much the queen and consort loved stag’s antler chandeliers and tartan bell pulls, they didn’t spread into the ballrooms of Mayfair. Highland trappings were merely a temporary affectation, even among aficionados, no more sincere an expression of cultural solidarity with the Scots than the mandarins on the wallpaper of an Oriental-style drawing room implied a love of Chinese imperialism. Though visiting the Highlands was just about acceptable, Highlanders themselves were often seen as demonstrably inferior. ‘A detestable race with some excellent exceptions’ was the verdict of Captain Hawley of the 89th. ‘It is a fact that morally and intellectually they are an inferior race to the Lowland Saxon,’ one Scottish journalist had insisted in 1847. This attitude was strongest in the Scottish lowlands.* In 1851 the Fifeshire Journal had stated categorically that: